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  5. AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs OpenStack

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs OpenStack

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

OpenStack
OpenStack
Stacks790
Followers1.2K
Votes138
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Stacks12.8K
Followers8.8K
Votes59

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) vs OpenStack: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the world of cloud computing, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and OpenStack are commonly used technologies for managing and distributing incoming network traffic. Understanding the key differences between these two platforms is essential for making informed decisions when choosing the right tool for your specific needs.

  1. Architecture: AWS Elastic Load Balancing is a fully managed service provided by Amazon Web Services, offering three types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer (ALB), Network Load Balancer (NLB), and Classic Load Balancer. On the other hand, OpenStack provides load balancing as a service (LBaaS) through its Neutron networking service, enabling users to deploy and manage their load balancers within an OpenStack environment.

  2. Scalability: AWS Elastic Load Balancing allows for automatic scaling of load balancers based on demand, ensuring seamless performance during traffic spikes. In contrast, OpenStack LBaaS may require manual intervention for scaling load balancers, potentially leading to latency and performance issues during high traffic periods.

  3. Pricing: AWS Elastic Load Balancing follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the amount of data processed by the load balancer and the features utilized. OpenStack, being an open-source platform, offers load balancing capabilities as part of its overall networking services without additional costs, making it a cost-effective option for budget-conscious organizations.

  4. Integration: AWS Elastic Load Balancing seamlessly integrates with other AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch, providing a comprehensive ecosystem for managing and scaling applications. OpenStack LBaaS, on the other hand, is tightly integrated with the OpenStack environment, allowing users to leverage the platform's networking and compute resources for load balancing tasks.

  5. Flexibility: AWS Elastic Load Balancing offers a range of features such as SSL termination, content-based routing, and health checks, providing users with the flexibility to customize and optimize their load balancing configurations. OpenStack LBaaS, while offering basic load balancing functionality, may lack some advanced features and customization options available in AWS ELB.

  6. Community Support: AWS Elastic Load Balancing benefits from Amazon's extensive support infrastructure, including documentation, tutorials, and community forums for troubleshooting and assistance. OpenStack, being an open-source project, relies on community contributions and may have varying levels of support and resources available, depending on the user's engagement with the community.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between AWS Elastic Load Balancing and OpenStack is crucial for selecting the right platform based on factors such as architecture, scalability, pricing, integration, flexibility, and community support.

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Detailed Comparison

OpenStack
OpenStack
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

Compute;Storage;Networking;Dashboard;Shared Services
Distribution of requests to Amazon EC2 instances (servers) in multiple Availability Zones so that the risk of overloading one single instance is minimized. And if an entire Availability Zone goes offline, Elastic Load Balancing routes traffic to instances in other Availability Zones.;Continuous monitoring of the health of Amazon EC2 instances registered with the load balancer so that requests are sent only to the healthy instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy, Elastic Load Balancing stops sending traffic to that instance and spreads the load across the remaining healthy instances.;Support for end-to-end traffic encryption on those networks that use secure (HTTPS/SSL) connections.;The ability to take over the encryption and decryption work from the Amazon EC2 instances, and manage it centrally on the load balancer.;Support for the sticky session feature, which is the ability to "stick" user sessions to specific Amazon EC2 instances.;Association of the load balancer with your domain name. Because the load balancer is the only computer that is exposed to the Internet, you don’t have to create and manage public domain names for the instances that the load balancer manages. You can point the instance's domain records at the load balancer instead and scale as needed (either adding or removing capacity) without having to update the records with each scaling activity.;When used in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), support for creation and management of security groups associated with your load balancer to provide additional networking and security options.;Supports use of both the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).
Statistics
Stacks
790
Stacks
12.8K
Followers
1.2K
Followers
8.8K
Votes
138
Votes
59
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 60
    Private cloud
  • 39
    Avoid vendor lock-in
  • 23
    Flexible in use
  • 7
    Industry leader
  • 5
    Robust architecture
Pros
  • 48
    Easy
  • 8
    ASG integration
  • 2
    Reliability
  • 1
    Coding
  • 0
    SSL offloading
Integrations
No integrations available
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to OpenStack, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)?

HAProxy

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Apache CloudStack

Apache CloudStack

CloudStack is open source software designed to deploy and manage large networks of virtual machines, as a highly available, highly scalable Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform.

Traefik

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

Fly

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

Envoy

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

VirtKick

VirtKick

Software as a service platform for hosting providers.

Hipache

Hipache

Hipache is a distributed proxy designed to route high volumes of http and websocket traffic to unusually large numbers of virtual hosts, in a highly dynamic topology where backends are added and removed several times per second. It is particularly well-suited for PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and other environments that are both business-critical and multi-tenant.

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy

node-http-proxy is an HTTP programmable proxying library that supports websockets. It is suitable for implementing components such as proxies and load balancers.

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Modern DDoS Protection & Edge Security Platform

Protect and accelerate your apps with Trafficmind’s global edge — DDoS defense, WAF, API security, CDN/DNS, 99.99% uptime and 24/7 expert team.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

DigitalOcean Load Balancer

Load Balancers are a highly available, fully-managed service that work right out of the box and can be deployed as fast as a Droplet. Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure to increase your application's availability.

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